Slaying The Fear Factor - Jim Campbell of NStor - Company Operations

Computer Technology Review, July, 2000 by Christine Chudnow

An Interview With nStor's Jim Campbell

Christine: What is SANStor? What are its primary features and benefits?

Jim: There are a lot of companies out there that are talking about Storage Area Networks. On one end of the spectrum, you have people that are considering these things, but looking at very expensive proprietary systems. On the low end of things, the IT managers are trying to build these things themselves, but they have a lot of questions. They have questions about interoperability, about skilled IT storage professionals, about how much time is it going to take before they see the benefit of what they're doing. And if they have a problem, who do they call?

We believe that in the middle of that there's an opportunity for nStor to provide a product like SANStor. At the core of the SANStor product is nStor storage technology. We surround that storage technology with components that are key for a SAN environment. We have Ancor switches, HP SAN Manager software, and QLogic host bus adapters and, instead of developing proprietary relationships with these companies, we've worked with their standard offerings and make sure they do work together, as well as taking it further and testing it in specific environments. We'll sell a complete solution. We'll come in and assess the company's needs, install the product, and offer them full support with one phone call to one company and a single point of contact if there are any questions or problems.

Christine: You've developed for NT and Unix, but will not develop for Novell. How about Macs?

Jim: That's an open question. We have a lot of business that's in the video development and multimedia development areas such as Universal Studios. We obviously have an interest in working with those kinds of environments and we're looking into that.

Christine: Would you consider your primary value add to be interoperability and compatibility?

Jim: Yes, but what's also important is support. Some companies have different components on site. They're supposed to be interoperable and compatible, but they test it together and they have a problem. So who do they call? They call the host bus adapter company and the host bus adapter company says it's the switch guys and they call the switch guys and they say no, it's the software. So we think this is one of the important value adds in here because, if you buy the system from us--if you have a problem--you call us. One company, one phone call.

Christine: Do you sell through the channel?

Jim: We have a three-pronged approach to the market. Outside the U.S., we go through distributors. Within the U.S., we go through our own direct sales force and we have some resellers that we work with directly. The third prong of our approach, both domestically and internationally, is with OEMs and we are developing relationships with them right now.

Christine: Do you also work with end users such as IT departments or SSPs?

Jim: We do a lot of work with Internet service providers and with companies that are Internet-centric. High technology companies, the people in ISP and ASP worlds, are doubling their storage requirements every 90 days. We work very closely with those people. We also have a lot of customers in the oil and gas arena, government, video, and multimedia environments. A lot of our customers are in these technology-based companies where there's a tremendous growth in storage.

Christine: Do you find that the IT departments are storing their data in-house or in co-locations or SSPs?

Jim: The vast majority of them are working their systems in-house. Many companies have a group of servers, but they don't have huge IT departments. They need to get easier access to their data, to get it under control, to be able to scale it more easily, to have the benefits of a SAN, but taking on a SAN could be intimidating. So they try to solve the problem by maintaining what they have and adding some Network Attached Storage solutions, but NAS is a short-term fix and they're still not realizing the benefits of a Storage Area Network.

That's where we'll come in. We'll assess their needs; we'll find solutions specifically for their environment; we'll install it; we'll train them on it and then we support it! That's really what the IT managers are looking for and we can do that cost effectively because we're using open systems storage.

Christine: Where do you see storage networking going in two years? I'd say five, but I'm not sure that's possible!

Jim: I think storage will continue to be a focal point of decisions that are made in computing for some time to come. Everybody now realizes that servers are commodities. Over the last couple of years, a lot of server companies have gone out and bought storage companies because, when you look at the margins they derive from a sale, the margins are going to come from the storage side, For that matter, a vast majority of the revenues are going to come from the storage side. So those companies have acquired storage companies to try to capture more of a market share, but I think a lot of people are really getting tired of getting locked in to a closed type of sale. Just because they bought a Compaq server, why should they be required to buy Compaq storage?